Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Kristeva understands psychoanalysis to be: a demythologized religion; a secular mysticism;
and a mystic atheism that offers a transitional and sacred space between theology’s
transcendentalism and Freud, Marx and Nietzsche’s reductive scientific materialism.
Kristeva’s atheism is radically different from that enshrined in Communist orthodoxy.
Kristeva has a profound understanding of the religious influences in Russian and Eastern
European literature and the wider intellectual and cultural history of Europe. Latterly
Kristeva has regained an appreciation of the liturgy of the Orthodox Church, ‘All my
childhood was bathed in this’ (Sutherland 2006) and she experienced a profound grief that
the Bulgarian authorities denied her devout Orthodox father a funeral and any religious rites
(Midttun 2006). 255
Kristeva believes that religion offers a vital but illusory and incomplete hermeneutic that
becomes most effective through its female mystical tradition. Psychoanalysis as a secular
mysticism, in Kristeva’s mind, offers an experience of Other but needs to avoid ‘a certain
fideism, or even degraded forms of spiritualism’ finding their way into ‘psychoanalysis
ideology’. Psychoanalysis’ purpose is ‘not to prepare the other for some sort of
transcendent existence but rather to open up as yet undefined possibilities in this world’
(Kristeva 1987a: 26f.). Kristeva’s impact in the wider cultural world of psychoanalysis and
in the feminist understanding of psychoanalysis has been enormous (Elliott 2003), but
impact in terms of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, while noted by Kernberg, is much
more difficult to assess. The very complexity of her thinking and her advocacy of a pluralist
255 In an interview Kristeva comments, ‘I am not a believer, I believe in words. There is only one resurrection
for me - and that is in words … I'm not Catholic by background. My father was a very great believer, but in the
Orthodox Church, in Bulgaria. As a young woman my Oedipus conflict was in a perpetual fight with that.
Afterwards I tried to understand what Christianity is and my approach became more intellectual. On the one
side, I'm very much interested in religion. On the other hand, I don't make any kind of spiritual - how shall I
say - extrapolation or message’ (Sutherland 2006).
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